The author of the piece here has something to say about that, too: write code top-down.
> There are two ways to architect a program and write code: top-down and bottom-up.¶ […] The correct way to architect and write a program is top-down. This is not a matter of taste or preference. Bottom-up design is fundamentally busted and you shouldn’t use it. Every system I’ve been involved in that used top-down succeeded and those that used bottom-up failed. [...]
> At every level there’s pressure to do bottom-up programming. Avoid it. Instead, start at the top, with `main()` or its equivalent, and write it as if you had all the parts already written. Get that to look right. Stub out or hard-code the parts until you can get it to compile and run. Then slowly move your way down, keeping everything as brutally simple as you can. Don’t write a line of code that isn’t solving a problem you have *right now*. Then you may have a chance of succeeding in writing a large, working, long-lived program.
> There are two ways to architect a program and write code: top-down and bottom-up.¶ […] The correct way to architect and write a program is top-down. This is not a matter of taste or preference. Bottom-up design is fundamentally busted and you shouldn’t use it. Every system I’ve been involved in that used top-down succeeded and those that used bottom-up failed. [...]
> At every level there’s pressure to do bottom-up programming. Avoid it. Instead, start at the top, with `main()` or its equivalent, and write it as if you had all the parts already written. Get that to look right. Stub out or hard-code the parts until you can get it to compile and run. Then slowly move your way down, keeping everything as brutally simple as you can. Don’t write a line of code that isn’t solving a problem you have *right now*. Then you may have a chance of succeeding in writing a large, working, long-lived program.
<https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/programming/write-code-top-...>
See also: Java for Everything <https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everythin...>